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1 Introduction The Handwriting on the Wall Many young people with whom I have conversed over the past twenty years have seen the 1960s as a golden age in the United States, when African Americans completed the last stage of their long march from slavery to freedom by building a noble and courageous movement that captured the hearts and minds of the people of the United States and the sympathy of many throughout the world. It was a time when young Americans (including soldiers) opposed the militarism of the U.S. government, ultimately convincing most Americans that the U.S. intervention in Vietnam was not in the interest of the people of the United States or the people of Vietnam. It was a time when African Americans marched to center stage in American society and forced the walls of Jim Crow segregation to come tumbling down. It was a time when Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and the Black Panther Party raised high the banners of Black Liberation. These young people often wanted to know what it was about my generation that enabled us to have such an impact on the country, which they saw as sorely lacking in their own generation. My response was always that there was nothing so special about my generation; we were products of our time. Sometimes I point out that a key intellectual failing of our pop u lar discourse is a lack of appreciation of temporalities, but before my listeners eyes glaze over in that here comes another professorial lecture expression, I move quickly to my main point about the 1960s: It was not merely the achievement of youth in the United States (as important as that was); the 1960s was a period of world revolution. All over the world the emancipatory designs of the common people tempered the corrosive and socially degrading power of corporate capitalism, and people of color boldly challenged the presumptions of a global geoculture rooted in the assumptions of

2 2 Introduction a white world supremacy. People of color all over the globe rose to claim their place in the human family as full and respected members of the world community. These movements in Africa, Latin America, and Asia inspired people of African descent, Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans, Native Americans, Asians, and whites in the United States to believe that a demo cratic, just, and egalitarian world was indeed possible and that they could and should contribute to the building of such a world. The rise of what was called the dark world was heralded by Malcolm X as the end of white world supremacy. Malcolm pointed out that the black revolution in the United States was not the rebellion of a minority but a part of the worldwide struggle of the oppressed against the oppressor. The great Chinese revolutionary Mao Zedong agreed. He argued that the evil system of imperialism began with the enslavement of the Black people and would surely come to an end with their complete liberation. While people often associate this period of militancy beyond the civil rights movement with Malcolm X s comment that we will achieve our freedom by any means necessary and the Black Panther Party s rhetoric about picking up the gun, the more enduring legacy of Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party was their contribution to a larger movement: They illuminated the landscape with their fresh understanding of the world and a vision that ordinary people who had been victims of the most ruthless exploitation and degradation could collectively create a world that was egalitarian, democratic, and just. However, the tension between the heroic act of the oppressed and the larger and more demo cratic vision that Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party articulated created a juncture at which federal and local law enforcement agencies could implicitly justify acting as occupying armies not only to bring these dangerous organizations under control but also to monitor and undermine the efforts of all who were involved in the movement as a whole. It is only in this context that we can understand how the FBI s war against Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., could gain such wide support among liberals, who in theory supported the program of the civil rights movement. While it is often difficult for the actors in these dramas to operate at a remove that allows them to see both sides of this story, it is much simpler to locate one s own assessment on the basis of whom one trusts. Can Black folks trust whites, who have so seldom risen above self- justifying discourse in their relationship to Black people? Can whites trust Blacks, whose judgments are so often refracted through the memory of past wrongs that they cannot appreciate that there has been a sea change in the racial attitudes of white Americans? Is it simply that there can be no trust from their very different locations within the racial order of U.S. society? Intellectually and practically, this seemed to be a dead end, but maybe that is the reality. Derrick Bell (1992) and Molefi Asante s (1999) argument about the intractability of the racial divide may have won the day after all. 1 One cannot argue for a position simply because one does not wish to feed cynicism about the possibilities for social change or because one wants only one type of intellectual position to hold. This is clearly not my position. My first response to a simple

3 The Handwriting on the Wall 3 linear understanding of race relations is that one cannot fully understand the differences that separate liberal intellectuals, activists, and citizens unless one looks at the phenomenon over a long time frame. This, of course, takes us back to the issue of temporalities, or social time. Like many who have argued for what has recently emerged as the study of the long civil rights movement, I argue that we may understand the actions of these three entities better if we position the dilemma in the context of the rise to prominence of a liberal internationalism that Henry Luce referred to as the American century. It was through this worldview that powerful forces within the United States sought dominion over the earth. It consisted of a mature global liberalism promising the spread of the good and then the great society to all Americans and eventually to everyone in the world who followed America s example and direction. Though it was a frankly hegemonic project that was global in scope, it differed in form from the colonialism practiced by the Eu ro pe an powers. It seemed to be of a piece with the civil rights movement, which sounded the central themes of democratization, equal rights, and social justice. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a young Baptist minister who had led the Montgomery Bus Boycott came to symbolize the spirit of the civil rights movement and the promise of America. He skillfully articulated a vision of the American dream that captured the imaginations of tens of millions of Americans of all colors and creeds. King s challenge that America live up to the true meaning of that dream was viewed as the final push that would inspire the people of the United States to complete the great unfinished American revolution. But Malcolm X was skeptical; he had listened carefully to the voices of millions of Black people who lived outside the Jim Crow South yet who were more deeply marginalized from the U.S. white mainstream. Malcolm X helped call the attention of the nation to these marginalized masses by speaking in their voice and helping them to speak in their own voice. Ultimately the eloquence of these voices plus the voices of the barefoot people in the jungles of Vietnam (King 1967) drew King closer to Malcolm s view, and King began to say that the operations of U.S. power were a nightmarish ordeal for the world s have- nots and for many of the most disadvantaged people of color within America s borders. During the early 1960s, the most idealistic period of America s global liberalism, the youthful rebels of Students for a Demo cratic Society argued for a radical demo cratization of U.S. society, but the rebellion against U.S. hegemony manifested in the struggles in Vietnam, Algeria, Cuba, China, Ghana, Guinea, and other parts of Africa, Asia, and North America combined with the struggle of oppressed strata within the national borders of the United States undermined the largesse of the liberal state. The rapports de force had shifted decisively in favor of the colonized, semicolonized, dependent zones of the world- economy occupied in the main by people of color. Malcolm X, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Students for a Demo cratic Society, the Congress of Racial Equality, King, and a host of others called not only for solidarity with the revolutionaries of the three continents but also for the people of the United States to become a part of this elemental rebellion. The world revolutionary trend was global in scope, arrayed against the global power of the U.S. hegemon. 2

4 4 Introduction In the conservative atmosphere of neoliberal globalization and the Project for the New American Century, it may be easy to forget or difficult to comprehend a time when third world elites allied with the American hegemon all over the world were under challenge, and many people felt that victory was in sight. What was truly remarkable about this period was the depth of support within the United States for these movements in opposition to the power of the country s own ruling class. This kind of internationalism had been a regular feature of large sections of the Black freedom struggle and of the world socialist movement, but now it was the dominant position of large sections of the population of the hegemonic power, with a majority of young blacks and 40 percent of college students arguing that a revolution was necessary in the United States. During the late 1960s and early 1970s all society was a battleground, argues Max Elbaum in the opening pages of his book Revolution in the Air (Elbaum 2002:2). Elbaum captures the essence of this period by pointing out that the radicalization of large segments of U.S. youth stemmed in part from their all- important recognition that the power of the oppressed was on the rise and the strength of the status quo was on the wane (Elbaum 2002:2). Increasingly revolution seemed to be on the agenda for significant numbers of young people (Elbaum 2002:2). By the fall of 1968, he points out, 1 million students saw themselves as part of the Left, and 368,000 people agreed on the need for a mass revolutionary party. Among African Americans, he argues, revolutionary sentiments contended not just for influence but for preeminence, especially among those under thirty, as more than three hundred rebellions flared up among inner- city Blacks from 1964 to He reminds us that Nixon s brutal invasion of Cambodia in May 1970 led to the largest explosion of protest on U.S. college campuses in the country s history. Four of ten college students, nearly 3 million people, thought that a revolution was necessary in the United States. (Elbaum 2002:18 19). Business Week lamented, The invasion of Cambodia and the senseless shooting of four students at Kent State University in Ohio have consolidated the academic community against the war, against business, and against government. This is a dangerous situation. It threatens the whole economic and social structure of the nation (Business Week 1970:140). This, then, is one level of explanation if we pay attention to the issue of social time, or temporalities. If there is a lesson in this short story, then persons who are involved in this discussion with me often conclude that indeed it is true that there is something special about the sixties as a time but that the key to understanding it is the coincidence between the times and the people who acted in it. This conclusion generally increases the discussion s intensity and complexity. I then argue that the next level of discussion relates to how we articulate an emphasis on social time with the actions of subjects. There are three trajectories that we should pay attention to if we are to understand where the 1960s fit within U.S. and world history. Careful attention to such a framework might enable us to see a history that we missed when we were focusing on that par tic u lar moment in time. First, there is the time frame of our historical system the modern world- system, a capitalist world- economy which came into existence

5 The Handwriting on the Wall 5 during the sixteenth century. We should be able to locate the civil rights movement within the trajectory of our historical social system. How does the U.S. civil rights movement relate to the conquest of America, the enslavement of Africans, and the naturalization of the relations of the conquerors to the conquered in the concept of race? Second, there is the time frame of the rise and expansion of Europe, the progenitor of the capitalist world economy, which articulated its dominance of the non- European world via an ideology of Pan- European racism, or white supremacy. Third, there is the shorter time frame of global hegemonic states, of which there have been three: the United Provinces, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Unlike the formal empire of the era of British hegemony, the era of U.S. hegemony is marked by informal empire, or what some refer to as neo co lo nial ism, thus U.S. support for formal decolonization with its clear implications for Jim Crow segregation in the United States. While the emphasis of this work is on how Black internationalism articulated with the inexorable rise of the dark world during the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty- first centuries, it does not exclude that portion of the story that has to do with the rise, reign, and decline of the American century and with the workings of our historical social system, the capitalist world economy. Maybe we can position ourselves best by examining Anibal Quijano s (2000) provocative notion about globalization, a term used as a deus ex machina in today s world, a stand- in for Margaret Thatcher s notion that there is no alternative but the current system. On the contrary, Quijano argues that what we call globalization is the culmination of a pro cess that began with the constitution of the Americas and colonial- modern Eurocentric capitalism as a new global power. Fundamental to this new model of power, he argues, is the social classification of the world s population around the idea of race. While this concept is said to have originated with the origin of what Immanuel Wallerstein calls the modern world- system, Quijano points out that the racial axis of the modern world- system has proved to be more durable than its origin in the colonial situation. This is the basis of Quijano s notion that the model of power that is today hegemonic presupposes an element of coloniality. My emphasis on the last five hundred to seven hundred years of Pan- European hegemony does not at all deny the fact that civilizations were recognized as distinct constellations of sociocultural formations for thousands of years prior to the rise of the modern, colonial, capitalist, Eurocentric world- system, which is the subject of this book, and of intellectual and public discourse, which is my focus here. Most relatively informed people know something of the parallel existence of such major civilizations as Egypt, Persia, China, the Aztec, the Maya, and the Incas long before the creation of the sociocultural formations in Eu rope that were united under Rome. At the time of the Roman Empire, there existed four major constellations, according to Anouar Abdel- Malek (2000): (a) China, maintaining its continuity since its formation, twenty- five centuries B.C. to this day. (b) The central area of Islam, in South- West Asia and North Africa, around the Arab caliphates and shi ah Iran.

6 6 Introduction (c) The Indian sub- continent with a predominant Hindu culture while power was mainly the domain of Muslim rulers. (d) The Mongol Asian and Eurasian world, which came under Muslim rule during recent times. (Abdel- Malek 2000:565) As John Henrik Clarke (1996) points out in his historical studies of the African world, by this historical period Africa had had its long walk in the sun and it was indeed a great and mighty walk but the great African empires were in decline. Abdel- Malek argues that from the eleventh century onward, the rising Eu rope an power waged protracted warfare against Islam in the Arab world. Abdel- Malek is highly skeptical of the religious- civilizational banner under which the Crusades were launched, seeing them instead as a matter of plunder and subjugation. From the end of the fifteenth century to our time, according to Abdel- Malek, successive waves of colonialism, classical imperialism, and hegemonic imperialism were viewed as the spread of civilization (now identified exclusively with Pan- European civilization) to the rest of the world (Abdel- Malek 2005: ). With the global expansion of Eu ro pe an hegemony, this pattern spread to the rest of the world, along with the imposition of a Eurocentric perspective on knowledge and the use of a concept of race to naturalize the colonial relation between Eu ro pe ans and non- Europeans. Race as the means to justify the distribution of the world population into ranks, places, and roles in the world s structure of power outlasted the system of formal colonialism. This history calls on us to look at racism from a world- historic perspective (Fernand Braudel s (1972) longue duree) 3 using Michael Omi and Howard Winant s (1994) idea of racial formation and the rearticulation of race over the middle run as a component of this longer- term trajectory. Despite the significance of the enslavement of Africans and the struggles of people of African descent in the United States and the larger world to the struggle against racism, it should be clear that this is a global rather than a local issue. I do not see Black- White dynamics as a defining issue; rather, the issue is one of Pan- European racism, or white supremacy. I object to the facile and flattering notion that the United States of America is a nation of immigrants, which, except for African Americans, has been a city on a hill, a shining light that has attracted people from every corner of the world to its welcoming shores. Modern North America began not as a nation of immigrants, as is often claimed, but as a settler colony: British North America. This is clearer to no group more than the Native Americans, who were the first victims of this colonial expansion. The advancing frontier, so celebrated in North American folklore, is predicated on the dispossession of Native American lands and the elimination of the Native Americans themselves. I agree with Stephen Steinberg s (1989:5) insistence that the fabled diversity of the United States is based on the conquest, enslavement, and exploitation of foreign labor. The expansion of the United States entailed a pro cess of imperial conquest that extended to Mexico, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Cuba, and a neo co lo nial policy of domination of all of the Americas

7 The Handwriting on the Wall 7 (the Monroe Doctrine), which during the American century spread to the whole world. The incorporation of the Americas was the constitutive act of the formation of the modern world- system, which was a capitalist world- economy. It involved, first, the subordination of the Americas as a periphery to the Western Eu ro pe an core states. The po liti cal subordination of additional peripheries included the colonization of Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific and the incorporation of East Asia. The war against Mexico reflected the U.S. quest for a passage to India in obeisance to the divine command to subdue and replenish the earth (Takaki 1993:191). In doing so, the United States would finally bring civilization to the Yellow race, including the Chinese, who would be imported as cheap labor to build the transcontinental railroad. Railroad own ers viewed them as quiet, peaceful, industrious, and eco nom ical but also wanted them to be permanently degraded caste labor, forced to be foreigners forever (the first were so designated via the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882). In the white imagination, the Chinese took on racial qualities that had been assigned to Blacks: dark skin, thick lips, morally inferiority, childlikeness, savageness, lustfulness only a slight remove from the African race. (Takaki 1993:205). Amalgamation with the Chinese would lead to a mongrel of the most detestable sort that has ever afflicted the earth (Takaki 1993:205). The Chinese Exclusion Act set the pre ce dent for the National Origins Act of 1924, which prohibited Japa nese immigration. The mass imprisonment of Japa nese Americans during World War II was a continuation of more than a hundred years of racial aggression against people of Asian descent in the United States and in their homelands (Rhea 1997:40). Soon, however, the nineteenthcentury expansion of an imperial and racist enterprise in the United States would join the rest of the Pan- European world in a fight to maintain white world supremacy in the face of a counterhegemonic force among the residents of the dark world. The rise of the dark world had a number of fronts. I mention only a few elements of this arc of struggle here: the creation of the Indian National Congress in 1886; the Ethiopian defeat of Italy in 1896; the Japa nese defeat of Rus sia in 1905; the founding of the NAACP in 1909; the Mexican Revolution of 1910; the Chinese Revolution of 1911; the founding of the South African Native National Congress in 1912 (later to become the African National Congress); and a succession of revolutions in the Ottoman Empire (Turkey, Persia, Af ghan i stan, and the Arab world) in the early part of the twentieth century. I am attempting here to restore an angle of vision that was much more common during the early twentieth century so that we may better understand how Black people it in the international arena. History is not everything, John Henrik Clarke once wrote, but it is the starting point. History is a clock that people use to tell their time of day. It is a compass they use to find themselves on the map of human geography. It tells them where they are, but more importantly, what they must be (Clarke 1987:3). With regard to the need for Africana history, Dr. Clarke pointed out that the Eu ro pe ans not only colonized most of the world; they began to colonize information about the world and its people,

8 8 Introduction (Clarke 1994:2) forgetting or pretending to forget much that they had already known about the Africans. It is because of this historiographical obfuscation that I have made this rather extended preface. While there are a variety of angles one might take to understand the history of African Americans and there are some who would acknowledge the peculiar internationalism of Black social thought and praxis I wish here to relate the trajectories of various manifestations of Black radicalism to the increasing social power of the dark world and the decline of white Western hegemony over the course of the twentieth and twenty- first centuries. There can be little question that the domination of the white world over the dark world has declined in the last 150 years. Although the hierarchical relationship between the white world and the dark world continues, the white world has made adjustments to the changes in rapports de force between the two worlds. The sense of self- assurance that once marked the persona of the Pan- European population is no more, although some have sought to overcompensate for the changes in rapport de force by assuming a more strident assertive stance. Hegemony does not require macho assertiveness, though, and thus the strident assertion of moral superiority among large sections of the Pan- European world, most decisively in the United States, is a sign not of strength but of a loss of confidence. The cultural options of the dominated people in the world- system include courting or imitating the dominant people to win their favor or allay their antagonisms, and distancing themselves from the dominant people to build their strength. In the 1950s Sekou Touré spoke of the need to overcome the complex of the colonized (Wallerstein 1966, 1958, Toure 1959, 1972). 4 Touré called for African peoples to overcome their identification with the oppressor, echoed in Malcolm X s mocking comments about the house Negro identifying with the master so much that when the master was sick, the house Negro asked, Boss, we sick? The distancing option is represented by the stance of Malcolm X s field Negro, what William Sales (1994) deems the tradition of field Negro revolt. Within the United States there has been a long and continuing debate about integration versus separation (Black Nationalism), codified in the work of Harold Cruse (1967), among others. But the two positions are seldom as diametrically opposed as indicated in po liti cal debates. Some nationalist approaches are aimed at pluralist integration on a group basis into the dominant society, and some integrationist- assimilationist approaches seek to use the best principles of the dominant group to compel them to recognize the entitlement of all to fair treatment, or as a means of creating space for more options by putting on ole massa. Some have joked that it requires a good deal of optimism to undertake a project about the end of white world supremacy, especially at a time when racism seems to be increasing in intensity not only in the United States but on a world scale. But this has not always been very funny over the past hundred years or so, and it is increasingly less funny some thirty- five years after the end of the period of unquestioned U.S. hegemony in the world- system, which lasted from 1945 to The rise of East Asia, the terrorist attack on U.S. territory by al Qaeda, and what Samuel Huntington sees as the Hispanic (mostly Mexican) challenge to the United States Anglo- Protestant culture are all signs of growing

9 The Handwriting on the Wall 9 concern about both the decline of U.S. hegemony and the decline of the hegemonic status of the Pan- European world. This is not the first time since the dawn of Eu ro pe an hegemony five hundred years ago that such fears have assumed significance in the nation s discourse. World War I certainly shook the confidence of the Pan- European world and was reflected in Lothrop Stoddard s classic, The Rising Tide of Color against White World- Supremacy (1920), and Madison Grant s The Passing of the Great Race or the Racial Basis of Eu ro pe an History (1916). While W.E.B. Du Bois s commentary in The Souls of Black Folk is often given credit for predicting that the problem of the twentieth century would be the problem of the color line, Du Bois s position at the time of that writing was much more optimistic, anticipating that a rational appeal would vindicate the race in the eyes of a significant section of a rational but ill- informed white public. The social thought of people of African descent have long included the idea of the eventual rise of the dark world from the Christianized Africans at the time of the American Revolution, who saw themselves as people of the New Covenant (Moses 1998:44), to ordinary field hands, who underwent a Pan- Africanization with religious men at the center (Stuckey 1975). The notion of the rising of the dark world is part and parcel of the culture of re sis tance that animated people of African descent in slave and postslavery societies. It is a logical consequence of the widespread notion that the United States is a white nation, as is discussed in the work of numerous scholars (M. Bush 2004; Alexander Saxton 1990). Hubert Harrison s When Africa Awakes (1997) and George Wells Parker s The Children of the Sun (1981) are early examples of the manner in which the early New Negro intellectuals embodied this outlook. While many scholars have a passing familiarity with the work of Winthrop Stoddard and Madison Grant, the more general reading public might benefit from a short review of their work. In June 1914 Stoddard argued, The worldwide struggle between the primary races of mankind the conflict of color, as it has been happily termed bids fair to be the fundamental problem of the twentieth century (quoted in Stoddard 1921:v). In the introduction to the Stoddard classic, Madison Grant focuses on Eurasia as the main theater of world history, a conflict between three races found in the western part of Eurasia and their Asiatic challenger. The races that are the focus of Grant s introduction to the Stoddard classic and the subjects of his Passing of the Great Race are the great Nordic race in the northwestern peninsula of Eurasia, the Mediterranean race (which has been Nordicized), the Alpine (or Slavic) race, and the Asiatic Mongols. Grant is alarmed by the retreat of the Nordic race westward from the grasslands of western Asia and eastern Eu rope to the borders of the Atlantic but takes comfort in the Nordicizing of the Mediterranean race north of the sea and the Nordicizing of some of the Slavic populations in central Eu rope, Austria, and the Balkans. But the establishment of a chain of alpine states from the Baltic to the Adriatic at the end of World War I at the expense of the Nordic ruling classes is said to take us back to the days of Charlemagne, whose successors took a thousand years to push the frontiers of Eu rope eastward (Stoddard 1921).

10 10 Introduction Grant concludes his introduction as follows: Now that Asia, in the guise of Bolshevism with Semitic leadership and Chinese executioners, is or ga niz ing an assault upon western Eu rope, the new states Slavic- Alpine in race, with little Nordic blood may prove to be not frontier guards of western Eu rope but vanguards of Asia in central Eu rope. Grant doubts that the Alpine states can hold firm against Asian incursion now that they have been deprived of Nordic ruling classes through demo cratic institutions (Stoddard 1921:xxxii). For Grant, democratic ideals are fine as long as we are dealing with a homogenous population of Nordic blood, as in En gland or the United States, but it is suicide pure and simple for the white man to share his blood with or entrust his ideals to brown, yellow, black, or red men. Stoddard echoes Grant s condemnation of Bolshevism as the archenemy of civilization and of the Nordic race: To the Bolshevik mind, with its furious hatred of constructive ability and its fanatical determination to enforce leveling, proletarian equality, the very existence of superior biological values is a crime. Bolshevism has vowed the proletarianization of the world, beginning with the white peoples. Every po liti cal grievance, every act of discrimination, every nationalist aspiration is fuel for the Bolsheviks incitement of race and class warfare. Stoddard sees the Bolshevik menace in China, Japan, Af ghan i stan, India, Java, Persia, Turkey, Egypt, Brazil, Chile, Peru, Mexico, and the black belts of our own United States (Stoddard 1921:220). Stoddard concludes that Bolshevism is the renegade, the traitor within the gates who would betray the citadel, degrade the very fiber of our being, and ultimately hurl a rebarbarized, racially impoverished world into the most debased and hopeless of mogrelizations (Stoddard 1921:221). It is for this reason that Bolshevism must be crushed, no matter what the cause, not in defense of democracy, as would later be claimed, but in order to oppose the democracy, leveling, and egalitarianism that Stoddard and Grant considered to be Bolshevik ideals. For Stoddard, there is no imprescriptable right to in de pen dence or to empire. One has to deal with the realities of each case in terms of the logic of the overall defense of the system of white world supremacy. Stoddard argues that the period of white expansion took two forms: areas of white settlement such as North America, which has become an integral part of the white world, and regions of po liti cal control such as India. Those areas of white settlement are called the inner dikes of white civilization and must be defended at all costs. Future generations are said to have a right to demand of us that they be born white in a white man s land (Stoddard 1921:226). This, Stoddard contends, is an elemental call of the blood, which must be heard lest the white world heed the writing on the wall. At the same time, Stoddard argues, the practically absolute world dominion that the white man enjoyed during the nineteenth century can no longer be maintained, since the life conserving nature of white rule everywhere has favored colored multiplication. Therefore, in those areas of po liti cal control, such as Asia, where the populations are capable of self- governance, the white world should be governed by pragmatic considerations rather than by the overheated passions of doctrinaire imperialists. In these areas whites should cede control

11 The Handwriting on the Wall 11 by evolutionary and peaceful means and thus retain the capacity of cooperative relationships with the newly in de pen dent regimes. The alternative to this pragmatic concession, Stoddard cautions, is the opening up of violent shortcuts that would be mutually disastrous, especially because the weakening of the white world during World War I evoked in bellicose and fanatical minds the vision of a Pan Colored alliance for the overthrow of white hegemony at a single stroke (Stoddard 1921:229). Not only would such a prospect make World War I seem like child s play, but also the fanning of the flames of needless antagonism would only increase the hostility of Asians toward the white world and could have dire geopo liti cal ramifications for the white world in the long run. Stoddard argues that causing such festering hatred might poison the attitudes of people in other colored lands and even reverberate among some in the white world as well. This kind and level of hostility could ultimately result in the formation of a Pan- Colored or Colored- Bolshevist alliance (Stoddard 1921:233). Therefore, taking a conciliatory attitude toward the aspirations of Asians for in de pen dence would enable the white world more effectively to defend what Stoddard considers the true outer dikes of the white world in Black Africa and mongrel- ruled Latin America, which could not stand alone (Stoddard 1921: ). The danger to the inner dikes of the white world is constituted by allowing immigration to overwhelm the pro cess of natural selection that had enabled America to amass an unpre ce dented racial trea sure by the beginning of the nineteenth century. Stoddard argues that the colonial stock was perhaps the finest that nature had evolved since the classic Greeks, the pick of the Nordics of the British Isles and adjacent areas in Eu rope. Since the very pro cess of migration was so difficult, only persons of courage, initiative, and strong willpower would face the difficult journey to an untamed land haunted by ferocious savages (Stoddard 1921:262). This magnificent stock was undermined, however, by the opening of the country to a deluge of immigrants, allowing for the dilution and supplanting of superior stock by inferior stock. Stoddard laments the impossibility of any advanced and prosperous community maintaining its social standards and handing down to its posterity in those days of cheap and rapid transportation. The only solution to this dilemma, Stoddard argues, was restrictions on immigration. The entire logic of civilizational progress was undermined by the way that the modern world was proceeding. Why practice prudence if hungry strangers can crowd in at your table at places reserved for your children (Stoddard 1921:261)? The great accomplishments of the white man in abolishing distance have destroyed the protection that nature once conferred. The white world will be swamped by the triumphant colored races and will finally perish (Stoddard 1921:303). Since the time of Stoddard s and Grant s classics, the twentieth century has been dotted with revolutionary challengers to the capitalist system and to the system of white Western hegemony. It was only in the 1960s, though, that the magnitude of the challenge in the United States assumed such proportions that scholars such as Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin began to refer to that period as the civil war of the 1960s. Indeed, their conceptually bold America

12 12 Introduction Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s (2000) captures the scope of the transformation attempted but suffers from its short time frame and thus its inadequate periodization. Since Black internationalism has been one of the most consistent and per sis tent challengers to the problem of the color line and its more modern ideological analog the notion of liberal universalism and has constantly rebuked the United States for its grossly exaggerated demo cratic claims, I think an examination of Black internationalism is a necessary element for a thorough examination of the social tensions and contradictions in U.S. society and the larger social world in which it is embedded. What I attempt to do in this project is to locate the New Negro, civil rights, and Black Power phases of the Black freedom struggle in a larger tradition with sites in the United States, the Ca rib be an, and Africa and among the social and national movements of the Three Continents. This study seeks to determine the overall impact of these movements, their impact on other social forces, and the resultant transitions in U.S. society as a whole. While this work is not a detailed history of these movements, it attempts a serious estimate of the significance and impact of the movements. Some may caution that a more modest scope is needed; this may be the case for some investigators, but I do not hesitate to locate myself in a long tradition of Black radical scholars, Black scholar activists, and radical scholars from a variety of traditions who have consistently attempted to contextualize social research within the framework of large- scale, long- term social change. Indeed, the use by Manning Marable (1984) and others of the term Second Reconstruction to describe the 1960s is an indication that other scholars feel the need for a broader conceptualization of these elements of social movement theory. The origins of this study are in part positive, from my study of Black Nationalism and class struggle in the twentieth- century United States, and in part negative, from the practice of counterinsurgency forces operated by the state. Former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover argued during the early 1960s that the nation was in the midst of a social revolution, with the racial factor at its core (O Reilly 1989:355). Hoover sought to prevent the rise of a messiah to unify the Black militant forces (Churchill and Vander Wall 1988, 1990), but Malcolm X and King were not only charismatic leaders who together commanded the attention of most of those at the bottom of the economic ladder and a substantial section of those in the middle; they were also visionary intellectuals who viewed America and its oppressed within a world context. They both called for siding with the barefoot people of the earth. King followed Malcolm X, and then the Black Panther Party followed both men, though it claimed only Malcolm X. The ruthless repression of this populist Left by the state s security forces in allegiance with conservative nonstate organizations led to the cadrefication of large segments of the New Left, which is noted in this study but the details of which are the subject of a subsequent research project. The societal convulsions caused by this uprising affected not only the lower orders but the centers of governance as well, who in attempting to settle the grievances being raised crafted far- reaching policies that redefined and expanded notions of equality, justice, and democracy. This in turn had an impact

13 The Handwriting on the Wall 13 on scholars, including sociologists, and the public s understanding of race, class, and poverty. This shows that the public s ideas and their capacity for creative conceptualization is not static but responds to the agency of human subjects. Here we note some elements of the societal transformation that justified the use of the term the Second Reconstruction, but the details of that story will be the work of a subsequent research project. The research undertaken here is intended to deepen the insights from my recent book, We Are Not What We Seem: Black Nationalism and Class Struggle in the American Century (Bush 1999), and to broaden my focus on the trajectory of opposing ideologies and movements. The most urgent corrective to my previous work must involve a more sophisticated use of the concept of social time. Much of my elaboration about the trajectory of the Black Liberation movement in the twentieth century focused on the middle run. This was an important corrective to the focus on the short term that one finds in many works of historical analysis, but the work lacked all but a very cursory perspective on the long term. In subsequent work I have attempted to correct this oversight. I follow the Working Group on Coloniality at the State University of New York at Binghamton (Binghamton University), which has argued that the modern capitalist world that unfolded over the last five hundred to seven hundred years had as a fundamental element pro cesses of racial formation and domination that have been central to its expansion and or ga ni za tion. These pro cesses have been the focus of social movements that have or ga nized against the multiple forms of this global structure of racial formation and domination. Quijano argues that the formation of the Americas was constituted by two fundamental historical pro cesses: (1) the codification of the differences between conquerors and conquered in the idea of race, assumed to be a biological category that naturalized the hierarchical relationship between the conquerors and the conquered on the basis of the superiority of the conquerors and the inferiority of the conquered, and (2) the articulation of all known forms of labor control (slavery, serfdom, small- commodity production, and reciprocity) on the basis of capital and the world market. The population of the new world and later the entire world was ordered along these axes. Terms that had heretofore referred to geo graph i cal designations, such as Eu ro pe an, Spanish, Portuguese, now referred to a putative racial designation. In the Americas, the idea of race was a way of granting legitimacy to the relations of domination imposed by the conquest. After the colonization of America, Quijano argues, the expansion of Eu ro pe an colonialism to the rest of the world and the subsequent constitution of Eu rope as a new identity required the elaboration of a Eurocentric perspective of knowledge, what Quijano views as a theoretical perspective on the idea of race as a naturalization of colonial relations between Eu ro pe ans and non- Europeans (Quijano 2000: ). Of course social domination was not new, but the use of the concept of race as a means of legitimizing this domination was indeed new and (with the important exception of gender) has proved to be the most effective and long- lasting instrument of universal social domination. Race became the fundamental criterion for the distribution of the world population into ranks, places, and roles in

14 14 Introduction the new society s structure of power. Within the Pan- European world, race replaced religion as a means of ordering the world s people. In a pre sen ta tion about cultures in conflict at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Wallerstein pointed out that it was in the course of a revolt against the dominance of religion that Enlightenment humanism- scientism staked its claim to a true universalism, one that could in theory be accessed by all via verifiable rational analysis. However, since people still came to different conclusions about truths, there was a need to resolve this quest for a universal truth. Enlightenment humanism- scientism was forced to create a hierarchy of human beings according to their degree of rationality. So if the course of things were to be ordered in the most useful way, then priority should be given to the more rational. This is of course the usefulness of the concept of race, because human populations are ordered on the basis of who is more rational, which of course always turns out to be groups to which the dominant strata belong. This new structure of power included a new articulation of a variety of forms of labor control deliberately established to produce commodities for the world market. These forms of labor control, which included slavery, serfdom, petty commodity production, reciprocity, and wage labor, were not mere extensions of their historical antecedents, because of the manner in which they were tied and articulated under a system of commodity production for the world market. In Anglo- America the indigenous people were not colonized but were formally recognized as nations, with formal international commercial and military relations. Colonial- racial relations existed only between Blacks and whites. When the nation began to expand, it dispossessed the Native Americans of their land and almost exterminated them. The survivors were then imprisoned within North American society as a colonized race (Quijano 2000:560), but the use of race as the means of justifying the distribution of the world population into ranks, places, and roles in the world s structure of power outlasted the system of formal colonialism (Bush 2006:345). The fact that racism is so deeply encrustated in the social structures, the super- egoes, and the institutional and ideological structures of the pan- European world; the fact that racism is what defines a Eu ro pe an (white) identity means that many racialized practices pass under the radar of the non- racialized populations. They are simply normal and there is no need to take account of these practices. 5 It is therefore not a variable easily susceptible to liberal reformism (and its sometimes good intentions) or conservative color blindness (a much more defensive orientation often with eyes wide shut). While the rearticulation of racial discourse may alter the expression of this pillar of our historical system, it remains as firmly in place as ever. 6 Racism is not simply a divide- and- conquer strategy among capitalists; it is constitutive of the class system within historical capitalism, which has taken the form of a capitalist world- economy. So the radical impulse that insists that racism will be with us as long as we live in a capitalist system is fundamentally correct, even if we cannot accept the old line of the U.S. Socialist Party, based on the class first idea, that we must wait for socialism, which will abolish the exploitation of man by man and thus the basis of natural competition among workers, which most of the Socialist Party leadership

15 The Handwriting on the Wall 15 viewed as the foundation of racism within the capitalist system. Harrison s assertion that the Socialist Party militants saw this competition as natural is key here and is similar to the critique that Anibal Quijano and others have made of the Marxist revolutionary and intellectual tradition. The old idea that capitalism began in Eu rope and later expanded to incorporate other parts of the world as colonial zones is an imprecise formulation. The capitalist world- economy was born as a Eu ro pe an core and an American periphery. Racism was a part of that birth; it did not come later as a strategy of divide and conquer used by capital. It was part of the stratifying pro cesses that were constitutive of historical capitalism, which was a capitalist world- economy. 7 The formation of a world working class performing different types of labor (wage labor, slave labor, petty commodity production, etc.) at different levels of remuneration was constitutive of the capitalist world- economy. Sections of the world worker s movement, particularly those outside the core zones, would eventually seek to explain such inequalities within the working classes in terms of the emergence of a labor aristocracy or a bourgeois stratum of the working class. If the cultural hegemony of a European- based world- economy relied in part on the social glue of Pan- European racial solidarity as moral justification for and defense of Euro North American world hegemony, then the subordinate populations of the non- European world and their descendents experienced this outlook as a system of oppressive humiliation that denied their humanity, intelligence, and dignity. People of African descent, who were at the bottom of the world status and social hierarchy, were actively engaged in constructing dreams of freedom and liberation, which in the postslavery twentieth century were often captured by the slogan The Rise of the Dark World. This then became a central component of African American radical thought. Since radical Black Nationalism had little hope of a strictly nationalist solution, it has long pegged its hopes on an internationalist solution. The logic of Ida B. Wells s appeals against lynch- mob violence at the end of the nineteenth century; Du Bois at the turn of the century speaking at the Pan- African Congress; the New Negro Movement; Du Bois, Graham, and Robeson during the popular- front period; and Malcolm X, King, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Angela Davis, and the Black Panther Party during the 1960s and 1970s all followed this trend. 8 The twentieth century had witnessed the dramatic rise of the dark world but not the end of white world supremacy, which really seemed an accurate observation and not merely wishful thinking on the part of Nation of Islam leader Malcolm X in 1963 (Malcolm X 1971). While I argued in We Are Not What We Seem that Malcolm s judgment was premature but that it was indeed a sign of the times that we must continue to take seriously, it would benefit us to look at the logic of Malcolm X s argument in more detail. First let us look at a snapshot of Malcolm s comments, which in my view summarized Malcolm s reflections on the spirit of Bandung, 9 so salient to the times in which he spoke: The time is past when the white world can exercise unilateral authority and control over the dark world. The in de pen dence and power of the dark world is on the increase; the dark world is rising in wealth, power,

16 16 Introduction prestige, and influence. It is the rise of the dark world that is causing the fall of the white world. As the white man loses his power to oppress and exploit the dark world, the white man s own wealth (power or world ) decreases.... You and I were born at this turning point in history; we are witnessing the fulfillment of prophecy. Our present generation is witnessing the end of colonialism, Eu ro pe anism, Westernism, or White- ism... the end of white supremacy, the end of the evil white man s unjust rule. (Malcolm X 1971:130) 10 The period during which Malcolm X spoke was the era of decolonization in Africa, a time when the spirit of Bandung was the framework for what Malcolm referred to as a worldwide revolution. For those who accepted the authority of the white world as a given, these were troubled times. Unlike a time when nothing could happen without the approval of the United States, the Soviet Union, or France, the people and nations of the dark world came together at the Bandung Conference in Indonesia in 1955 and agreed to submerge their differences and present a united front against the common enemy, the colonizing authorities of the Eu ro pe an world. It was in the context of this unity of the African- Asian- Arab bloc, Malcolm argues, that African nations were able to obtain in de pendence and join the United Nations. Now the members of the dark world had a voice, a vote, in the United Nations and were soon able to outvote the white man, who had formerly been their colonial authority. By being able to outvote the colonial powers, they were able to force the people of Eu rope to turn loose the Black man in Tanganyika, the Black man in the Congo, and the Black man in what we know today as the former French West African territories (Malcolm X 1971:97). While Malcolm was certainly not deceived by the real power of the United Nations, he viewed it as a forum in which international debates and discussions about issues of world power and justice could be aired. For Malcolm the new arithmetic of the United Nations was an opportunity to exert pressure for more democracy on the hegemonic powers of the white world, who had long exercised unilateral and dictatorial powers over the peoples and nations of the dark world. The new arithmetic of the United Nations was the handwriting on the wall, and Malcolm X was a master at showcasing this handwriting so that it was plain for all to see. Malcolm would not allow the world to miss the significance of British prime minister Harold McMillan s remarks and those of others crying the blues because of the passing of the famed British Empire, on which the sun had finally set. Like no one else, Malcolm was able to provide a narrative that explained in the clearest terms the implications of the French defeat in Indochina and the impact of the loss of its colonial possessions there on its economy and consequently on its inability to maintain an army sufficient to control its large West African colonies, leading ultimately to the collapse of French colonial power in Algeria under the weight of another fierce war of national liberation. Malcolm turned the spotlight on the Netherlands loss of Indonesia and the Belgian loss of the Congo. Malcolm taunted the former colonial powers, chiding

17 The Handwriting on the Wall 17 Belgium, which, he argued, had been a power on this earth as long as it controlled the mineral wealth the Belgian Congo. But once it lost control of its central African colony, the economy was so traumatized that the Belgian government collapsed. Malcolm called out to both the Black, Brown, Yellow, and Red victims of Euro North American hegemony and the residents of the Pan- European world themselves to read the handwriting on the wall. He called on them all to recognize the fundamental fact of that historical moment, in which the rise of the dark world was the occasion for the decrease in power of the white world over the dark world. It was his recognition of this change in the constellation of world power that gave Malcolm X such remarkable insight and that led him to make the correct call following the Kennedy assassination that this was a case of the chickens coming home to roost. If Dr. King s August 1963 speech represented the most articulate statement of the American dream and represented the height of the mature global liberalism that was the signpost of the American century, then it was Malcolm who most clearly understood and articulated the other side or the underside of this phenomenon. Malcolm X was a master teacher without peer (see Malcolm X 1971:81 120, ; Sales 1994). Power in defense of freedom, Malcolm argued, is greater than power on behalf of tyranny and oppression. For Malcolm the latter inevitably lacks the kind and degree of conviction of the former because the mentality of most who would implement power on behalf of tyranny and oppression is that of an employee. 11 However, there is a sense in which white supremacy has the capacity to produce a certain derangement and degrading of mentality that can be passionate in a negative and hateful sense. Malcolm clearly believes in the power of a life- affirming passion that can produce uncompromising and hopeful action (see, for example, Malcolm X 1965:150). Malcolm X taught that this was a period of worldwide revolution far beyond the bounds of Mississippi, Alabama, and Harlem. The revolutionary forces coming to the fore were to oppose not simply the U.S., French, or En glish power structure but an international Western power structure consisting of U.S., French, En glish, Belgian, and other Eu ro pe an interests. These former colonizers of the dark world had formed an international combine, but Malcolm called for unity among 22 million Black people in the United States and urged them to unite with 700 million of their Muslim sisters and brothers in Africa and Asia and with the revolutionary people in Africa, Asia, and the Americas (Malcolm X 1992: ). Malcolm reestablished in the 1960s what other people of African descent had known in the past that the struggles of Black people in the United States were not just an American problem but a world problem. Malcolm restored the sense of internationalism that had long been a part of the imagination of people of African descent of its leaders and intellectuals and among the common people. Fanon Wilkins (2001) has most effectively navigated the break in this Black internationalism by the liberal compromise among sections of the civil rights leadership during the cold war period of the late 1940s to the late 1960s. 12 While Wilkins focuses on the continuity of Black internationalism breached by the liberal compromise, William Jelani

18 18 Introduction Cobb (2006) focuses on the history of Black anticommunism in the United States. Malcolm clearly thought that the end had come for the dominant strata of the white world. He was of course not alone. What time is it? was a common refrain during the period from 1965 to 1975, when the cumulative strength of a variety of liberation movements seemed to signal the death knell of Pan- European domination. Having established the convincing case made for Black internationalism by Malcolm X, I would like to look back at the social, economic, po liti cal, and spiritual forces that have been the foundation of my own analysis of this issue. Articulating the International Dimensions of the Black Experience While this view comes preeminently from reflections on Malcolm X s remarks about the end of white world supremacy, my sense of Black internationalism was powerfully reinforced by an essay published in the mid- 1980s by Bernard Magubane, a South African scholar and member of the African National Congress, then an anthropology professor at the University of Connecticut speaking at the tenth anniversary of the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University, which focused on theoretical and research issues in Africana studies. The task that these scholars set for themselves was to understand the theoretical and research issues to be focused on in Africana studies during the next de cade. The organizers of the conference could have hardly chosen a better person than Magubane to conceptualize the po liti cal economy of the Black world. The title of Magubane s pre sen ta tion was The Po liti cal Economy of the Black World Origins of the Present Crisis. I was impressed by his manner of addressing the conference. He cautioned his audience about viewing history as nostalgia and gently chastised some for their tendency to reify the past, as if Black history consists of simply identifying and enumerating dead mummies (Magubane 1984:283). The past, Magubane argued, is very much a part of the present, and Black poverty could not be understood without viewing it through the lens of a world perspective. In historical perspective, then, the economic plight of the black world is rooted in the exploitation that resulted from the rise and expansion of the world capitalist system. The African slave trade not only integrated the Black world into the world capitalist system; it was the major source of primitive accumulation for Eu rope an and American capitalists. 13 The overall consequence of this pattern of social and economic integration of Africans into the world- economy is that Black skin continues to be associated with ge ne tic inferiority. One could thus conclude a system of structural and ideological racism turned on the historical incorporation of Africans into the capitalist world- economy as involuntary servants. This manner of incorporation of Africans into the emerging world- economy also had implications for the determination of agency. Thus, a very important consequence of the forced dispersal of African people as involuntary servants

19 The Handwriting on the Wall 19 within the capitalist world- economy made of Africans the first truly international proletariat and, moreover, made the fortunes of capitalism inseparable from the misfortunes of Blacks (Magubane 1984: ). In describing the place of slavery in the capitalist world, Magubane quotes directly from a letter from Marx to P. V. Annenkov in 1846: 14 Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that has given the colonies their value; it is the colonies that have created world trade, and it is world trade that is the pre- condition of large scale industry. Thus slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance. Without slavery North America, the most progressive of countries, would be transformed into a patriarchal country. Wipe out North America from the map of the world, and you will have anarchy the complete decay of modern commerce and civilization. Cause slavery to disappear and you will have wiped America off the map of nations. Thus slavery, because it is an economic category, has always existed among the institutions of the people. Modern nations have been able only to disguise slavery in their own countries, but they have imposed it without disguise upon the New World [Marx, 1971, 94 95]. 15 (Magubane 1984:284) For Magubane, Black people are held to be outcasts from civilization. Slavery not only shattered the fabric of African society; it is the foundation of Africa s underdevelopment. Moreover, the enslaved Africans were the first proletarians to suffer the full weight of capitalist exploitation and dehumanization (Magubane 1984:287). Despite the particularities of people of African descent, Magubane echoes Du Bois s call that we should never lose sight of our commonality with that dark and vast sea of human labor in China and India, the South Seas... in Central America... that great majority of mankind on whose bent and broken backs rest the founding stones of modern industry (Magubane 1984:286). There is a fertile intellectual tradition, Magubane informs us, that should assist us in overcoming this reified historical consciousness, consisting of intellectuals from various locations within the Black diaspora: Dr. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Walter Rodney, and Lerone Bennett, Jr. On the whole, Magubane suggests, the Black professional managerial strata everywhere have become accessories in the enslavement of their own masses. The counter to the status quo universalizing of the intermediate strata is that the class position of the overwhelming majority of the Black world, as an international proletariat, has been the foundation of much more enduring social aspirations located in much of the Pan- African and Garvey movements (Magubane 1984:293). I would only add that Magubane also might have mentioned the National Negro Congress and the Council on African Affairs of the period, the 1960s radicals, such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Revolutionary Action Movement, the Nation of Islam, and the Black

20 20 Introduction Panther Party; and the 1970s radicals from organizations such as the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, the Congress of African Peoples, Malcolm X Liberation University, Peoples College, the Youth Or ga ni za tion for Black Unity, the Republic of New Africa, the African Peoples Party, the African People s Socialist Party, and many others. There is an irony here that is not at all subtle. In contrast to the civilizational rhetoric of the enlightenment of which Marx and the Eu ro pe an workers movement were a part, the idea and practice of Black Liberation by the enslaved Africans and those at risk of enslavement in Africa itself were examples for the rise of the socialist and workers movements of a later time. 16 While Magubane recognizes the commonality of the Black experience and others despoiled by a rapacious system, he views the black experience as unique. Imperialism negated the historical pro cess of African people in Africa and throughout the world. Yet despite the nominal in de pen dence of most African countries and the increasing electoral gains made by blacks in the United States, the Black world remains in the grips of hunger, poverty, and disease. For the most part Magubane attributes this po liti cal weakness to the ideological weakness of the black leadership, consisting in the main of a comprador bourgeoisie that voluntarily chooses capitalist solutions to the problems of poverty both for personal expediency and because they have been conditioned to believe in such solutions. 17 Even this class is often on the margins of the power elite of the world- system, though, given their proximity to a group that is central to the pariah classes of the world- system. Despite the gains of some members of the African world, it is undoubtedly true that Pan- European racism is the Achilles heel of the modern world- system, and the demographic situation of the United States, with its large, strategically located populations of color, is a key locus of struggle for a more just, demo cratic, and egalitarian world order. Clearly Magubane articulates a class- based understanding of the international dimensions of the Black experience, focusing on pro cesses of capitalist development and class formation in the context of capitalism as a world- system. He locates the cultural expression of Black internationalism in a structural context, in contrast to an approach that places greater emphasis on the evolution of a global African culture as an expression of what Eddie Glaude, Jr., calls a specific form of life which binds Black people together in the United States and throughout the world (2000:12). Glaude is much more evenhanded in this analysis and avoids the extremism of what I would call radical antiessentialists such as Paul Gilroy (2000). I too wish to avoid a misdirected and one- sided criticism of cultural nationalist or Afrocentric scholars and activists. Instead I would like to review briefly an analysis of Black internationalism that I believe is much more sophisticated, that of Tiffany Patterson and Robin D. G. Kelley (2000). Patterson and Kelley take the position that dating back at least to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Black writers and activists (such as Juan Latino, Ottobah Cuagano, Olaudah Equiano, and Jose Manuel Valdes) have described themselves as part of an international Black community. While some assume that this international Black consciousness was a consequence of the

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Course- wide 1. Understand the significance of the past to one s own life, and to society. 2. Perceive past events and issues as they were experienced by people at the time, to develop historical empathy

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U.S I Quarterly Assessment Practice Test Circle the best answer to each question. 1. Which of the following is NOT an argument in support of imperialism or expansionism? A. The United States should become

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Essential Question: What was the impact of European imperialism in Africa and India? Unit X Quiz 2 1. When did the Suez Canal open? 2. Why was it initially difficult for European powers to control their

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Can China Rise Peacefully John Mearsheimer September 17, 2004 Why China s Rise Will Not Be Peaceful The question at hand is simple and profound: can China rise peacefully? My answer is no. If China continues

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SECTION 1 Note Taking Study Guide EARLY DEMANDS FOR EQUALITY Focus Question: How did African Americans challenge segregation after World War II? Fill in the timeline below with events of the early civil